cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25779751
The intative promises to be privacy-friendly with no tracking. Stating:
Your privacy is important. The WiFi4EU app ensures a private online experience with no tracking or data collection. Simply connect and enjoy free public Wi-Fi without concerns.
Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/wifi4eu-citizens
Will be interesting to see how this spans and plays out in reality. Looks promising too, did a quick scan of their builtin permissions and trackers and looks good too. (Scanning tool is called Exodus)
My traffic is not vulnerable, but my device might be.
When you connect to public WiFi, you also share it with others, and maybe someone on that network wants to test out their new hacker skills ?
Maybe not as much of a problem for phones, but that juicy developer laptop running unauthenticated MongoDB with a dump of the production database… yup, that now “mine”.
Ideally all those services should be listening on 127.0.0.1 / ::1, but everybody makes mistakes. Maybe the service comes preconfigured to listen on 0.0.0.0.
Just keep your firewall set to public network and you will most likely be fine.
Anything can be hacked, even on your private home network.
Again, people make mistakes, so they may think the firewall is on, but that one time 3 weeks ago when they were debugging something and they turned off the firewall for it, yeah, we never got around to enabling it again.
Also, my home network is a lot more secure by default than shared public WiFi. At home I have decent control over who and what connects. Sure, people could in theory crack my WiFi password, but the risk of that is low compared to sitting on public WiFi.
Nothing we can do to prevent that, unless we want to turn all laptops into walled gardens. PEBKAC is not the fault of the WiFi network.
I mean, we could switch to Linux distros (so that you can fine-tune DNS and VPN settings without corporate BS), but the intricacies that introduces to connecting to the WiFi safely are not casual in scope. Most people are better off buying a lightly-used Mac (or not, it’s been a while since people have been happy with Apple) or replacing their laptop with a Fairphone or Graphene OS phone than switching to Linux from Windows 10.
Windows 11+ however… is another story. Anything but letting the IngSoc Smart TV become the OS. The issue is that computers come bundled with Windows and so they use “Secure Boot” to trap you. You can’t use Secure Boot without Windows, and you can’t play many online games if you do not have Secure Boot (even if the excuse as to why is a filthy lie) so if you’re gaming you basically have to hope that Steam OS triumphs.
Best option is to just go to places where the wifi service is affordable but not free so that the operator needs to keep tabs on whether users are doing something other than browsing the internet or playing games (i.e. stealing people’s info or putting malware on their machine). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any great demand for internet cafes anymore in my location.
I don’t really see the connection there with somebody bringing down their own firewall, hosting open services, and basically putting out the welcome mat. You can burn yourself on any OS (and if you can’t, I don’t want to be using or pushing it).
What place charges little enough for the WiFi to be affordable but has somebody live monitoring network traffic?
You’re telling me Internet Cafes can’t exist? Yes, they’re not available, but they should be. And supporting industry of small business IT Security providers still do business with motels and hotels.
Maybe increase the standards of service requirements, but if not? Yeah, we need to find a way to make free WiFi that doesn’t demand you trust the operator will monitor for malicious users, instead of limiting safe internet access to our own homes at best.
Internet cafes, at least in my experience, provide you computers. They don’t sell you WiFi access. And I very much doubt they have somebody monitoring network traffic live.
If you’re saying they COULD exist, I doubt they’re financially viable.
Maybe it’s different in the EU then. Here, when cafes had internet, they offered a WiFi password for customers.
Someone runs MongoDB unauthenticated, bound on 0.0.0.0 with production data, on a computer without a VPN, and the problem is the WiFi?
Like I get what you are saying, but this sounds like saying that we should ban speedbumps because imagine there is a guy with a loaded gun pointed at a kid with no safe, finger on the trigger, and high on coke, if the car hits the speedbump the toddler is gone. Yeah, but I would hardly say the speedump is the issue.